I'm interested in AI, especially now that the www is a gigantic knowledge pool. I thought I'll learn C in order to experiment with getting "knowledge" from the internet and use it in a program. However, someone told me to take a higher level language like Java, because C is for system programming. Java is very good in accessing the internet, html processing,... all things I will need. In C I will have to program everything myself. Even a string in C is actually just an array of chars (ints)...

However, as soon as I began learning Java, I had the feeling Java is too bloated. Just simply testing 2 objects for equality, forces you to write an error-prone equals method.
Input and output is organized in a tremendous amount of classes: Digest Outputstream, Deflater OutputStream, Checked OutputStream, Buffered OutputStream,....
I think I won't be able to memorize the language, it's just too big. On the other hand C is smaller, but you have to write everything yourself.
What's your opinion about this? Is C suited for AI-programming? Is Java better?
I'm a hobbyist, not a professional, if that's relevant.